I go to stand beside the electric fence around the goats that are left

and—animal—I ache to grab the charged wire,

saliva iron in my mouth.

Later I am put to bed between the two and we buck and roll

in the heat of not fucking and the sweat of the guests,

how they know I belong to something but don’t know the to-whoms.

Still out by the grazed absence field,

I remember being photographed

holding the tawny goat when he was a kid.

His horn nubs burned down to the skull, to the not-grow.

They climb their doghouse shed, the goats.

Once, they got out and climbed my car.

I undo the power to the fence. I climb the shed like a kid.

A rash of lichen barnacled to the roof of sloping 1x4s.

Sea dollars, if I give little white-capped hills to aquatic imagination— jellyfish dried, flattened, and pressed within an atlas.

Lichen the color of lamb’s ear, but not the softness.

The page of a book left in a steamy bathroom.

Lichen like the squamous moon,

lichen like magazine photographs

from helicopters

over fertile tributaries

as they dry.

The newest colonies

only half of my smallest fingernail—a baby’s breath of green

branching like tiny coral in the rooftop sea.

I am fascinated by the simplest rules:

that a full flush is all only ever luck,

that three of a kind is exponentially more valuable than a pair,

that the same turned card lives differently between us.

And the speed of a run and double run and double double run—

coal black coal train stowaway run away.

An afternoon that Tracy goes to town

Margaret and I read The Thistles in Sweeden

to each other, taking turns,

and find it altogether too close to this home.

The story-woman wept

when she tore down the curtains,

but the real one just pinned them level.

The story-woman had a child

in her body and was made satisfied by it.

This one spent the growing season

with an abdomen of no baby, of “nobody’s there.”

Sorrow in the no-child.

And crying in the rows of tomato pearls

beneath a broad-brimmed hat.

When these conversations were so not mine to feel about—

just held out my comfort hands in the field and,

dazed from the summer sun,

watched a bee bumble drunkenly among the blades of grass.

What fills the vacuum space when one is displaced

by a much smaller thing?

The avalanche moves in me.

Iconography as it stands:

bison cut into wood : claim jumper claim jumper

dog-eared bedside : one million baby names

county line | rail line : place where you surround something

egg in the hen house : city pigeon, a pencil through its neck and still alive

ledger : the dank erotics of a lover’s gym clothes on the Sunday morning floor

February : shame muscles flexing in my mother’s tight jaw

I think about you a lot now.

You know this, in some way,

even if you never come to exist.

I think about the insufferable things we ask of children.

How I was born to make my mother happy,

to make her into a mother

unlike her own—one whom we would not watch drown herself.

One who would not orphan her teenage daughter.

[Give me these pronouns for now, I need them.

It is always a her, it is always a doubling.]

And how I made myself secret.

The way 50 degree dusk will forever have me

walking home from middle school

uphill,

how I was so unhappy then,

how I lived outside my body,

how I planned never to touch anyone.

When I thought about dying a lot, I was captivated by

self-immolating monks and Jains sweeping that uphill sidewalk

so as not to foot-crush a single worm beneath a leaf.

The Jain death of rice then water then slow no-hunger hallucination.

I thought, I will keep this in my chest only.

And the other way I think about you— in phone call.

And in this thought, even now,

you are my grin. You, small nothing.

I imagine it is Margaret on the phone,

so glad and afraid.

Or Tracy, or both of them, on speaker and I have a right thing to say.

I imagine you as their voices cracking because

the wait has been a breaking too.

New abdomen growing.

Holding you when you are real, if you are real,

saying you were the second stripe on a test that meant

more life in their house.

Once you are the “somebody’s there,” hold on hold on in there.

I will step away from the dinner table to take the call.

I will step into the pantry, my own stores.

I will walk out to the shed, I will climb on top of my own car.

I will let the cards fall. I will turn the power back on.

I will paint the room, I will build the crib.

I will love you hard, I don’t have to say it.

Will you grow here,

far enough out of town that the first time you hear a siren

it is a cowling caged-animal cry, bending through the hills?

Will you have a name for me?

Will you leave home angry?

What part of you will be kept secret?

Listen, little somebody,

your mule is nothing stubborn.

It is the weary task for you,

that which will carry your weight

across unsteady ground

with certain hooves.

Believe that the bald-faced moon won’t bluff,

that every drought has a brother monsoon,

that no shame is worth hiding, it is theirs not yours.

I had gone to my mother’s house alone, adult,

to clean some things.

Before my walk to the uphill train station,

I let the door of the garage close for what seemed

instinctively, if uncertainly,

to be the last time.

And in that slow mechanical shutting

a sigh was breathed between us,

our warm cavities equal in musty near-October.

Appendix of a home,

kites on the rafter shelf

steeped in fumes of impatient idling.

That exhaustion, held in beams,

yielded soft with rot.

When the omnipotent gear began its overhead lurch

dust took on the breath smell of the dirt it had been,

of spreading mulch over the dead dog,

of closing the day's half used gallon of varnish,

of car wax and Round-Up and fertilizer

put in their places

for a tidiness that is Mother's Day.

Will you do this with me?

Shall we love them together?

You can call me the thing of my name,

and I can be small life

and you can be large life in their house.

Something I have never seen before.

This game half un-played.

I will stay in the guestroom if you’ll have me.

I will walk through walls to your crying sound.

Smallest smallest thing,

the avalanche asleep in you.

“Scavenger” was originally published in High Ground Coward and is reprinted here with the permission of University of Iowa Press.

ALICIA MOUNTAIN is the author of the collection High Ground Coward (University of Iowa Press), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Thin Fire (BOAAT Press). She is a lesbian poet, critic, and educator based in Denver and New York. Keep up with hermat aliciamountain.com and @HiGroundCoward.